As the number of telecommunications options available increases so does the need for a method of managing those options. The two most significant communication channels are the computer and the telephone. In order to achieve greater efficiency and flexibility attempts have been made to integrate the telephone and the computer.
The earliest method for integrating telephone services and computers (also known as computer telephony integration or CTI) simply used the personal computer as a telephone dialer and address book. The computer stored the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of numerous individuals. A telephone number would be selected and the computer would generate the DTMF tones to place the call (in-band dialing). The user would then pick up a handset once the phone on the other end was ringing or answered.
By the late 1980s mainframe platforms and proprietary communication application programming interfaces were the most common method of computer telephony integration. This resulted in limited solution to the question of how best to integrate telephones and computers as well as numerous hardware and software incompatibilities. With the advent of Microsoft's Telephone Application Programming Interface (TAuPI), illustrated in FIG. 1a, and the Telephony Services Application Programming Interface (TSAPI) from AT&T and Novel, illustrated in FIG. 1b, CTI is becoming a technology for the widespread integration of telephones and computers.
The advent TSAPI and TAPI has increased the number of communication options available to users through the integration of telephone services and computers. Unfortunately, most prior art systems require the user to learn cumbersome and nonintuitive commands in order to utilize the features of the system. There is a need for a telecommunication management system which provide an easy to learn and intuitive interface for powerful TAPI and TSAPI based telecommunication systems.